Most chicken sold in stores is contaminated, Consumer Reports says

A report released Thursday indicates that just about all chicken sold in U.S. stores contains harmful bacteria, and nearly half are tainted with a so-called superbug that's resistant to antibiotics.

The Consumer Reports study, its most comprehensive to date on poultry, tested raw chicken breasts purchased at retail outlets nationwide for six bacteria, then checked for antibiotic resistance. The results showed nearly half of the samples were contaminated with at least one bacterium resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics, what's known as a superbug. Slightly more than 10 percent were tainted with two superbugs.

That finding is cause for alarm, said Urvashi Rangan, a toxicologist and executive director of Consumer Reports National Research Center.

"We're in a public health crisis," Rangan said. "Pharmaceutical companies are not making new antibiotics."

42. I use just plain old white vinegar

I keep it in a spray bottle and wipe down all my counters and everything that gets touched at least daily and more often if I'm handling things like chicken. It's highly effective and you don't have to worry about bleach stains on your clothes if you aren't wearing kitchen whites. Some people have countertops which don't play well with vinegar so your bleach solution is also a highly effective alternative.

45. Commercial kitchens and butchers are using bleach as well

74. Nah...we all use quaternary ammonium salts now, bleach is a thing of the distant past.

Every operation I've worked in since I started in the field in 1997 has used quaternary ammonium sanitizers across the board. They're more effective than bleach while being much less corrosive and toxic; NYC DOH regulations recommend a dunk in quat followed by air-drying, bleach is permissible but requires a further rinse in clean water. The mixing and use of bleach are still taught in the ServSafe and NYC Food Safety classes but more as a backup if you run out of quat, instead of a primary method. Bleach does work much better on soiled surfaces but you shouldn't be trying to directly disinfect them. Wash, rinse, sanitize!

(We wear white because it's the easiest to get stains out of - the laundry company just blasts them with bleach and hot water.)

79. My time in a commercial kitchen goes considerably farther back

Back then the health dept required a disinfectant as I'm sure they still do. I'm not sure if they required bleach back then as there are a number of effective disinfectants, but that's what we used. It doesn't surprise me that commercial kitchens are using other things as there were a number of drawbacks to bleach. I use white vinegar in my kitchen because I'm not using it to scrub down meat slicers and all I need is a disinfectant for smooth surfaces. Vinegar is extremely effective against all the most common pathogens any home kitchen is likely to encounter. It's also cheap, easy to use, and environmentally friendly. It contains to surfactants, so I agree that washing and rinsing is a separate and no less important step.

83. Sani buckets are still a 100% must, we've just moved on from chlorine

I've always been surprised straight quay isn't generally available to the public (a lot of disinfecting cleaners have it, but not straight) - it's superior to bleach in every way for food service and home use. Doesn't destroy clothes or stainless steel...it's so gentle you don't even need gloves. The only time I'd use bleach nowadays would be in a medical or lab setting where the intensity offsets the disadvantages.

101. Add Thyme and Basil essential oils which is probably the best disinfectant available, to the vinegar

66. From a microbiology tech: Make sure your bleach solution is freshly made and other tips

I have worked in microbiology labs for over 37 years. We used to use bleach solutions to clean our bench tops. We made up fresh solutions weekly and put them in squirt bottles. We use a commercial disinfectant now, but bleach works as long as you don't have stainless steel countertops. It can pit them.

I would trust a bleach solution more than a vinegar solution. Bleach will kill the virus that causes hepatitis.

I treat all chicken as contaminated. I pick up the chicken packages with my hand inside a plastic bag and then bring the bag down over the package. I always put chicken at the bottom of my cart so it doesn't contaminate anything else in my cart. When I work with it at home I wear disposable gloves and then squirt down all my counter tops with a kitchen disinfectant. I wipe counter tops and then throw down my rag into the wash right away. I clean off all faucet handles. I use a probe thermometer to test whether the chicken is done. Make sure it reads >165 degrees F. Do NOT eat raw chicken.

Campylobacter jejuni and Salmonella are the most likely pathogens you can contract from raw chicken. The biggest danger from Salmonella is that the infection can become systemic, i.e. it doesn't just stay in your intestines, it can spread into tissues and the blood stream. This is why Salmonella is the more dangerous of the two, but each of them can cause severe illness, especially in children or the elderly, causing dehydration that may end up with hospitalization. These enteric pathogens are reported by microbiology labs to state health departments and are tracked by CDC. Salmonella are serotyped, which is how the CDC tracks different strains.

These pathogens are easily grown from a stool specimen sent to a microbiology lab. If you suspect that you may have eaten raw poultry and subsequently get sick, urge your physician to order a stool culture so you can document this. We don't need much - any clean container will work. Have your doc fax an order to your local laboratory and drop off the specimen. Put the container in a plastic bag and submit it the same day it is collected. Make sure your name is on the container. Labs will reject specimens with no names, and the people taking care of you at the lab dropoff will appreciate that you have already labelled the specimen.

94. thanks for your informative post.

69. I do, too.

I have a spray bottle with bleach water in it and I clean all the counters and stuff in the kitchen with it.

Cheap and effective. I don't ever have raw meat in the house but I still use it because I have dogs whose little paws reach up on the counter sometimes. The dogs do get some meat but it is canned and cooked.

50. I do all my fresh food prep first

I put any salads in the fridge, everything else in pots. Then prepare any raw meat. While it is cooking, I sanitize the counters and other surfaces. After dinner, everything is wiped down again, including condiment containers, spice bottles, etc. We never have problems.

25. Yes. You are fine with safe handling practices and cooking to 165+

Many people don't understand cross contamination or just don't prevent it. Rachel Ray and many other video "chefs" are/were terrible with this. Scary. I looked at some vids on YouTube for how to make chicken fajitas and some of those people must have incredibly strong immune systems. Unreal the way people handle raw meat and contaminate EVERYTHING -- the fridge handles, the sink where you wash your hands handles, counters, plates, cats, kids. Salmonella City.

38. I've seen this also

Before I prepare uncooked chicken I make sure I have everything I need so that I'm not spreading pathogens across my entire kitchen. I've seen quite a few 'chefs' on TV who have absolutely no regard for this. One has to wonder how many people they are making sick. Salmonellosis gives you stomach cramps and the shits and it may not even hit you till 3 days later. Most people are going to assume they got it at a restaurant without realizing their greatest risk of infection is in their own kitchen.

29. Yes, they do. A lot of people don't use good handling and prep practices

like having a separate cutting board for meats and a spritz bottle of a weak bleach solution and immediately washing things like knives and tongs that are used before the meat is cooked. A lot of people don't have the mental capacity, the time, or the wherewithal to do this.

I can see people turning to vegetarianism just because handling meat is becoming too complicated.

I buy antibiotic and hormone free chicken at the health food store on the theory that the bugs it carries aren't resistant ones.

61. Not always

There's a program here in Canada called "Marketplace" that does stories about bad business practices or stories. Anyhow, they did one about chicken and yes, even organic chicken had tons of all kinds of antibiotic resistant bacteria. In fact, one of the top scientists in the field got sick from anti-biotic resistant salmonella himself. They did a 'test' with one lady who insisted she was very careful about cleaning (ie, wiped everything down with a bleach solution, washed her hands before and after handling the chicken, etc) and then they held one of those lights to see if any bacteria were left. Well, the bright glowing spots showed that even careful washing doesn't always get all of the bacteria. There were spots on her hands, on her counters, on her dish towels...

I'm pretty particular about cleanliness and cross contamination in my kitchen, however...I eat at my parent's house a lot. I witnessed my dad use the same tongs for the raw chicken as for the cooked chicken (I ALWAYS use different ones, or wash really well in hot water in between). I freaked out on him and he rolled his eyes at me. He still does the same thing. It bothers me that you have to not only be vigilant in your own kitchen, but everywhere else you eat. And it doesn't even matter sometimes if you are a vegetarian because if you go somewhere that prepares meat, there's always a chance of cross-contamination.

It's depressing to me - the bacteria shouldn't be there in the first place.

My family has never been sick from it, but I do know several people that spent a few weeks in the hospital with salmonella. It's not that uncommon unfortunately.

10. What NYC_SKP said…..

13. Which isn't to say that overuse of antibiotics isn't a problem, because it certainly is.

But I know that the USDA has allowed for what I have always thought to be pretty high incidents of salmonella, for example, in turkey and chicken.

Yonkers, N.Y.—Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, today called on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to drastically tighten its present Salmonella standard, which allows almost half the samples tested at a ground turkey plant to be contaminated with this disease-causing bug. Consumers Union also called on Congress to give the USDA mandatory recall authority, as it just did for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Food Safety Modernization Act.

“The current USDA ground turkey standard, which allows 49.9 percent of samples in a test run to be positive for Salmonella is unacceptable and clearly ineffective as a tool for food safety,” said Jean Halloran, Director of Food Policy Initiatives at Consumers Union.

63. Bingo. Absolutely right.

It kind of pisses me off that the responsibility keeps being passed on to the consumers here. As I mentioned upthread, there is a program here in Canada on CBC tv that did a show about the same issue - how contaminated chicken is - and they showed someone who stated she was very careful about preparing chicken. Even after all her cleaning, their tests showed she had bacteria everywhere in her kitchen. I don't want to end up hospitalized because in my hurry to prepared dinner I miss a dime sized spot wiping the counters, KWIM? The producers have to take some responsibility here.

62. Raw Chicken has been known to host tons of nasty critters for a long time

75. Superbugs, regular bugs, splitting hairs when it's on chicken.

The general rise in superbugs is a major concern, yes, but trying to make any kind of a furor over chicken having drug-resistant salmonella as opposed to regular is just silly. Chicken is one of the best-known-to-be-nasty foods on the market; everyone from Suzy Q. Homemaker to Jane P. Chef knows that it's filthy, has to be cooked well, and anything that touches it needs to be decontaminated thoroughly.

37. Yeah, the way the rules are they might as well be inspecting themselves...

14. Even free-range organic chickens get contaminated in slaughterhouses.

If you know a farmer who's raising organically and slaughtering the chickens himself, on his own farm, those should be safe from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The problem is the USDA demands that all chickens for public sale must be slaughtered in an "approved" slaughtering facility -- which means chickens so carefully raised on bugs and grass, end up getting cross-contaminated at the slaughterhouse.

It's time that USDA allowed small organic farmers to slaughter their own chickens.

56. Not true....

The only time you need a USDA plant with federal inspections is if you are selling across state lines. The issue is at the state level not at the federal one. Many states allow processing under what's know as the federal exemption. There is a manageable set of regs which the feds allow for on farm processing. The problem is when states don't allow it and add a set of regs on top of the federal ones.

Here in Georgia, a top poultry producing state, the current state is that they'll allow you to produce under the federal exemption but you have to have a state inspection. And guess what, they aren't going to fund an inspector. We've been working with the GA dept of Ag for over three years to get processing on farm and it ain't going to happen. The commissioner basically turns a blind eye to 1,000 birds and under but for anything above that, we are going to have to build a plant for small poultry producers in the state

64. OK, I guess it varies state to state

Here in Maine, you can sell direct farmer-to-consumer without inspections, and maybe slip in some sales at local farmers' markets, but to sell to grocery stores or to restaurants requires certified slaughtering facilities that small farmers can't afford to use.

28. Best to cook it before you eat it. Besides raw chicken is too chewy.

30. Which wouldn't be a problem if people would properly cook their chicken.

Unless these are heat-resistant extremophile bacteria, in which case all bets are off. Assuming they aren't, proper food handling and preparation guidelines should obviate any potential risks. (And this is a public health crisis that's been created in part by the routine use of antibiotics in feed for poultry and livestock.)

Two outbreaks of salmonella poisoning linked to the nation’s sixth-largest chicken producer, Foster Farms, may have sickened as many as 15,000 people this year — and underscored significant weaknesses in government food safety oversight, a new report finds.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service failed to adequately notify consumers of possible hazards, didn’t demand recalls of potentially tainted chicken parts and allowed poultry producers to continue shipping the meat to stores, despite evidence of contamination, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts released Thursday.

57. Just make sure they do them in full batches....

Those giant rotisseries could make an inexperienced employee start some new ones when there are some that are almost ready to pull. The way the machine has those chains and loops you could have nearly raw juices spilling onto cooked meat.

59. Gotcha, thanks I go home the Hospital tomorrow or sat and rather not poison myself

48. To be sure you could pop it in your microwave and reheat it to at least 175 degrees F.

as measured by a meat thermometer. While it's in the microwave cover it with a moist paper towel to help to keep it moist. Or better yet place it in a plastic container with the lid on loosely to allow steam to escape with a small amount of water.

I buy rotisserie chickens at my local market because for some reason a whole cooked chicken in the deli department is cheaper than a raw chicken of the same weight in the meat department. I have never understood why that is.

87. But during any food preparation,

poultry must be handled. Handling chicken that contains these new selectively bred superbugs can expose us to risk. Unless we want to heat our hands to 165° during the hand washing process. So, again, your argument is unsupported.

If poultry is raised in a relatively humane environment, the daily use of antibiotics is entirely unnecessary. The scientific consensus is that casual use and over prescribing of antibiotics is not in our best health interest. Antibiotic use in agriculture should be strictly controlled.

96. Consumers always make mistakes. And a superbug will more likely kill them.

while a non-superbug salmonella infection can be treated with antibiotics.

It's unrealistic to expect a hundred million households and restaurants and delis to be 100 percent careful with their food handling practices. Salmonella infections are more common than we realize, and many of them go undiagnosed as "stomach flu."

It's impossible to eradicate salmonella in chickens, but we can at least ensure that organic chickens retain their advantages by not mingling them in the same slaughter facilities as non-organic.

97. p.s. I have slaughtered chickens on a small farm

And I think those chickens ended up cleaner and less contaminated than in a USDA-approved facility. Since it was a small operation (only 100 chickens killed on a single day) we took our time with each chicken, and were very, very careful about gutting and cleaning. The rare time I accidentally nicked the gallbladder, that chicken was labeled unsellable and fed to the farm dog.

85. No, I'm not against regulation.

I'm saying that if you treat poultry with one ounce less caution because it comes from a small producer, you are putting your health and the health of everyone you cook for at risk.

There are reasons to buy local but if you think it means that poultry doesn't need to be treated with the same cooking precautions as store bought you are just plain old wrong.

BTW, why is everyone on this site so stuck on the fact that I'm clear about my background? Is it a bad thing that I"m actually familiar with the subject on a first hand basis? I didn't make anything resembling an argument against regulation. For the record though, the larger operations are subject to significantly more regulation than back yard local guys.

51. Damn LOL

Chicken products are like 50% of my diet if not more (yes I know I need to expand my horizons and eat better, don't judge me lol) Welp until the days I get sick after every time I prepare chicken, I will keep eating it, cause I am 99.9% sure that I have never been sick from preparing any raw meat which is shocking cause I'm a bit illness prone, I wash my hands almost to the point of washing my skin off periodically through the whole preparation of chicken or whatever raw meat I'm using.

58. I actually think...

This may be more of a problem for bird and flock health than that of humans. One of the biggest reasons for the lack of small scale poultry processing facilities here in GA has been concerns about possible transmission of diseases from small farms to the commercial processing industry

I be interested to hear from some our resident vets how these superbugs will affect ongoing generations of birds

60. Because of all these reports of contaminated meats,

65. Dude, that's what I'm talking about

I can't believe they say not to wash it. A person doesn't have to splatter the whole kitchen with droplets. Dump it gently into a bowl of standing water. Ajax the sink and use a clorox wipe, if you have to; after rinsing off chicken.

I don't follow the recommendstions not to wash off raw chicken. And I sniff it too. Any smell and back to the store. I wash my chicken and clean up after myself. So sue me.

It's like bringing sick patients to one central hospital to pass the worst bugs to each other.

My family member raises pastured, organic chickens -- no antibiotics, no grain, just insects and grass -- and the state of Maine tells him he can't sell his chickens to grocery stores or restaurants unless he takes them to a central slaughtering facility. In this facility, they also slaughter non-organic chickens who've been given antibiotics.

What's the point of all the hard work he's put into raising his organic chickens when the health department wants to contaminate them with super-bug bacteria from other farms' chickens?

He insists on slaughtering his own, because he knows that none of his chickens have super-bugs. But his only option is to sell to friends and neighbors.

89. Better yet, stop eating meat and dairy.

Americans eat way, WAY too much of that shit. It's not good for you, but it's subsidized, and cheap, while organic vegetables and fruits are not, and as a result are very expensive. It makes no sense at all.

98. Hardly matters if they do when they arrive in your home.

100. Salmonella infections about 30X what's actually diagnosed

Some medical literature estimates that the actual infection rate is 30X higher than we realize. These infections are already rampant.

So even though everyone's been told again and again to cook chicken till well-done, it's clearly not happening in this country. Why make the matter worse by having the salmonella antibiotic-resistant, so it's that much harder to treat when the patient shows up at the hospital?

103. I'm certainly not for it.

I agree, we use too many of these practices to keep meat cheap, when it really shouldn't be so cheap. I do think we eat too much meat in general, but I don't think it's necessarily good for you to leave it entirely out of one's diet. There are certain substances in meat that are necessary to proper brain function, and not everyone has the time or patience to be a well-prepared vegan chef. I've watched friends 'go vegan', eat poorly and eventually weaken to the point of passing out on their feet.